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About a dozen Parents 4 Teachers members braved the bitter cold late this afternoon outside City Hall to protest the Chicago Public Schools’ announcement yesterday that it would shutter 54 schools and turnaround another six, impacting about 30,000 students. Progress Illinois was there for the "Banner Day" event.

About a dozen Parents 4 Teachers members braved the bitter cold late
this afternoon outside City Hall to protest the Chicago Public Schools’
announcement yesterday that it would shutter 54 schools and turnaround
another six, impacting about 30,000 students.

Some
protestors toted signs and banners reading “School Closings = One Term
Mayor” while others passed out literature to passerby’s and cheered when
cars honked at them. Those at the “banner day” said it was one of many
actions planned in order to raise visibility around the issue of school
closures.

“We want the parents, teachers,
students and the communities where the schools are being closed to know
that they’re not alone, that there are people across the city, even
people like us whose schools are not being closed, who care about them,
who care about this issue and are willing to get out and stand out in
the cold and fight to keep these schools open,” said Parents 4 Teachers founder Erica Clark.

The group wants to spread awareness to Chicagoans who may not think school closings directly impact them, Clark added.

“This
is our city, our schools,” she explained. “What happens in these
neighborhoods impacts us all, and we all need to take a stand and say
this is not OK.”

Julie Fain, a Rogers Park parent with two children in CPS, said the district is yet again destabilizing Chicago’s schools.

“CPS
has consistently underfunded, under-resourced our schools, has been
attacking them for years, and this is a pretty horrific piece of that,”
Fain said. “But I think it’s been going on for a long time, and we want
to see it ended. We want to see neighborhood schools funded.”

CPS considers Rogers Park’s schools underutilized where Fain lives, but “at the same time they open a huge charter school, an UNO charter school, that we know has corrupt practices; it's undemocratic,” she said.

“I
think CPS is intentionally underutilizing our schools, if you want to
call it that, by opening private charters that are not accountable, are
using public money but act as private entities, and I feel like we see
the same kinds of things at work all over the city, even though the
crisis is felt most acutely in low-income, black and Latino
neighborhoods,” Fain said.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel and CPS CEO
Barbara Byrd-Bennett are not in the process of improving schools, they
are in the process of privatizing them, said retired CPS teacher Tina
Beacock, who held a banner reading “Zero School Closings!”

Emanuel was reportedly on vacation in Utah for a family ski trip yesterday when CPS broke the news about closing a total of 61 school buildings.

“Education
needs to be seen as a right of all the children in the country,
particularly in Chicago, and Rahm has made it his business to turn it
into a private piggy bank for the charter companies,” Babcock said. “It’s
just wrong.”

Beacock is a displaced history and Spanish
teacher who was pushed out of DuSable High School in Bronzeville when
three new schools moved into it as part of the Renaissance 2010
Initiative. One of the three schools that came to the high school was a
charter.

“Because of the way placement goes, I was never
hired again,” she said “It was just too demoralizing to watch the
disintegration of the schools and the total lack of respect for
teachers.”

CPS recommended in February that the Betty Shabazz Charter School in the DuSable Campus be closed at the end of the school year because of low test scores.

“If
you don’t change the underlying conditions that the children need to
learn, you’re not going to do anything about their achievement or about
their scores,” Beacock said.

She called the school closings “criminal” and plans to take
part in the massive Chicago Teachers Union rally set to take place
downtown at 4 p.m. on March 27.

Another big concern of the demonstrators was the fate of the closed school buildings.

“It’s
very harmful to a community,” said Fain. “You see with foreclosures
that boarded up buildings anywhere devalue people’s property, but also
just demoralize a community. When you feel like there’s no investment,
you feel like nobody cares, you feel like you’ve kind of been
abandoned.”

Also today, there was a walkout at Ryerson Elementary school in the city's North Side neighborhood of Humboldt Park. About 15 parents protested plans to close the school and reopen the building as the Laura S. Ward school, bringing in the Garfield Park students who currently attend that school in another facility.

Parents are concerned that combining the Ryerson and Ward schools could lead to gang violence or student scuffles.

"A lot of people from Ryerson and Laura Ward, they like get into it and then end up fighting," Ryerson seventh grader Gerald Taylor told DNAInfo.com. "That's why most people are talking they might transfer because who would want to fight everyday? Everyday you come to school, you got to fight."